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7 Best Android Apps for the Week

Get your weekly dose of this week’s best Android apps straight from Android Market. For this week’s free apps, you’ll love the trustworthiness of Friday, the sweetness of TweetComb, and full-episode cartoon shows from Cartoon Network. For the paid apps, restore order to the world of nano-sized pandas, clap your hands to find your phone, type with your thumbs (both of them!), and build a wooden tower. Here come this week’s 7 best Android apps:

Free Apps

Friday. The name is so Robinson Crusoe. And, rightly so because Friday, in Daniel Defoe’s classic adventure novel, was the name of Crusoe’s loyal and trusted servant. Okay, okay–personal assistant, to use a euphemism. As your loyal personal assistant, Friday’s main job is to keep track of everything that you’ve done on your Android device since the time you first powered it on. Such a loyal servant can come in really handy for moments when you can’t recall whether you called up your spouse as you promised, or whether you shot that very important email reply to a business client the other day. Friday remembers it all. You’ll be amazed at the statistics that Friday can keep track of for you.

TweetComb. The latest Android 3.0/3.1 Honeycomb has made some significant changes from its predecessors. But, if there’s one Twitter app that snugly fits into the Honeycomb interface, it’s Tweetcomb. The developer made it tablet-friendly, especially with a very versatile column layout. So, it’s a very sweet way to enjoy Twitter from your Honeycomb tablet. Go, feed that Twitter bird some honey from the comb.

Cartoon Network. Shows from Cartoon Network are delivered straight to your Android device through this app. Full episodes or just clips–watch them all from the Cartoon Network app. Want to find out whether there are replays or what time your favorite toon starts showing? This app lets you take a look at the complete schedule, too. One complaint, though: video quality may not be as awesome as you expect it to be. But, I don’t care much. Will you?

Paid Apps

Nano Panda. For less than a dollar ($0.90), you can control cute little pandas to zap the villains. Some physics is involved here, particularly the law of attraction. The pandas attract one another and when they do, their movement paths can change. So, check out this game involving nano-sized pandas. There’s a free version, too.

Clap Phone Finder. Remember that nifty little gadget that lets you find where you misplaced your keys by just whistling? Well, this app’s similar. All you have to do is clap your hands and your phone will ring wherever it is–in your bag, under the bed, under the laundry in the hamper. Nifty idea, eh? Clap your hands for the price: it’s just 93 cents.

Thumb Keyboard. This one’s not really a new app, but an updated version (4.03) with new features: multi-touch, toolbar customization, improved predictive text, customizable hotkeys for frequently used phrases, and width adjustment option for key blocks. In case you don’t have this very handy app, the most important convenience it can give you is thumb typing. Yup, forget about the four other fingers of each hand. Use them instead to support your tablet and just let your thumb do the typing. Pretty much similar to the way most people thumb-type a text message using both thumbs on a regular cell phone. The most amazing thing about Thumb Keyboard is its split layout. It’s simply ingenious, although I still find it rather counterintuitive to have the cursor keys assigned to the left thumb. But, then, it may just be something that I’ll have to start getting used to. Get this updated, full-featured virtual keyboard for only $2.49.

Jenga. Build! That’s what Jenga means in Swahili. Leslie Scott brought this game to the world in the 1970s, and now it’s available on Android. Jenga is a tower building game. You use 54 wooden blocks to build an 18-story tower. Each level consists of three blocks. The goal of the game is to build a higher tower without making the whole tower fall down. At each move, one block is removed from the lower levels (except the topmost and the level right below it) and added to the top of the tower. The Jenga app, with its realistic visual and real-time physics simulation, brings the fun and cooperative aspect of the real-life Jenga game to the Android. Go build that tower for only $2.99.